The second floor was stifling in spite of the open windows, and I saw why as soon as I got to the top of the stairs. Jo and I had shared space up here, she on the left (only a little room, really just a cubby, which was all she needed with the studio north of the house), me on the right.

At the far end of the hall was the grilled snout of the monster air-conditioning unit we’d bought the year after we bought the lodge.

Looking at it, I realized I had missed its characteristic hum without even being aware of it. There was a sign taped to it which said, Mr. Noonan: Broken. Blows hot air when you turn it on & sounds full of broken glass. Dean says the part it needs is promised Fom lstern Auto in Castle Rock. I’ll believe it when I see it. B. Meserve. I grinned at that last—it was Mrs. M. right down to the ground—and then i tried the switch. Machinery often responds favorably when it senses a penis-equipped human in the vicinity, Jo used to claim, but not this time. I listened to the air conditioner grind for five seconds or so, then snapped it off. “Damn thing shit the bed,” as TR folks like to say. And until it was fixed, I wouldn’t even be doing crossword puzzles up here. I looked in my office just the same, as curious about what I might feel as about what I might find. The answer was next to nothing. There was the desk where I had finished The Red-Shirt Man, thus proving to myself that the first time wasn’t a fluke; there was the photo of Richard Nixon, arms raised, flashing the double V-for-Victory sign, with the caption WOULD YOU BUY A USED CAR FROM THIS MAN? running beneath; there was the rag rug Jo had hooked for me a winter or two before she had discovered the wonderful world of afghans and pretty much gave up hooking. It wasn’t quite the office of a stranger, but every item (most of all, the weirdly empty surface of the desk) said that it was the work-space of an earlier-generation Mike Noonan. Men’s lives, I had read once, are usually defined by two primary forces: work and marriage. In my life the marriage was over and the career on what appeared to be permanent hiatus. Given that, it didn’t seem strange to me that now the space where I’d spent so many days, usually in a state of real happiness as I made up various imaginary lives, seemed to mean nothing. It was like looking at the office of an employee who had been fired… or who had died suddenly. I started to leave, then had an idea. The filing cabinet in the corner was crammed with papers—bank statements (most eight or ten years out of date), correspondence (mostly never answered), a few story fragments-but I didn’t find what I was looking for. I moved on to the closet, where the temperature had to be at least a hundred and ten degrees, and in a cardboard box which Mrs. M. had marked G^DOE’rs, I unearthed it—a Sanyo Memo-Scriber Debra Weinstock gave me at the conclusion of our work on the first of the Putnam books. It could be set to turn itself on when you started to talk; it dropped into its? ^use mode when you stopped to think. I never asked Debra if the thing just caught her eye and she thought, “Why, I’ll bet any self-respecting popular novelist would enjoy owning one of these babies,” or if it was something a little more specific… some sort of hint, perhaps?

Verbalize those little faxes from your subconscious while they’re still fresh, Noonan? I hadn’t known then and didn’t now. But I had it, a genuine pro-quality dictating-machine, and there were at least a dozen cassette tapes in my car, home dubs I’d made to listen to while driving.

I would insert one in the Memo-Scriber tonight, slide the volume control as high as it would go, and put the machine in its DICTATE mode. Then, if the noise I’d heard at least twice now repeated itself, I would have it on tape. I could play it for Bill Dean and ask him what he thought it was. What if I hear the sobbing child tonight and the machine never kicks on? “Well then, I’ll know something else,” I told the empty, sunlit office. I was standing there in the doorway with the Memo-Scriber under my arm, looking at the empty desk and sweating like a pig. “Or at least suspect it.” Jo’s nook across the hall made my office seem crowded and homey by comparison. Never overfull, it was now nothing but a square room-shaped space. The rug was gone, her photos were gone, even the desk was gone. This looked like a do-it-yourself project which had been abandoned after ninety percent of the work had been done. Jo had been scrubbed/ out of it—scraped out of it—and I felt a moment’s unreasonable anger a Brenda Meserve. I thought of what my mother usually said when I’d done something on my own initiative of which she disapproved: “You took a little too much on y’self, didn’t you?” That was my feeling about Jo’s little bit of office: that in emptying it to the walls this way, Mrs. Meserve had taken a little too much on herself.

Maybe it wasn’t Mrs. M. who cleaned it out, the UFO voice said. Maybe Jo did it herselfi Ever think of that, sport? “That’s stupid,” I said.

“Why would she? I hardly think she had a premonition of her own death.

Considering she’d just bought—”

But I didn’t want to say it. Not out loud. It seemed like a bad idea somehow.

I turned to leave the room, and a sudden sigh of cool air, amazing in that heat, rushed past the sides of my face. Not my body; just my face.

It was the most extraordinary sensation, like hands patting briefly but gently at my cheeks and forehead. At the same time there was a sighing in my ears… except that’s not quite right. It was a susurrus that went past my ears, like a whispered message spoken in a hurry.

I turned, expecting to see the curtains over the room’s window in motion… but they hung perfectly straight.

“Jo?” I said, and hearing her name made me shiver so violently that I almost dropped the Memo-Scriber. “Jo, was that you?”

Nothing. No phantom hands patting my skin, no motion from the curtains… which there certainly would have been if there had been an actual draft. All was quiet. There was only a tall man with a sweaty face and a tape-recorder under his arm standing in the doorway of a bare room… but that was when I first began to really believe that I wasn’t alone in Sara Laughs.

So what? I asked myself. Even if it should be true, so what? Ghosts can’t hurt anyone.

That’s what I thought then.

When I visited Jo’s studio (her air-conditioned studio) after lunch, I felt quite a lot better about Brenda Meserve—she hadn’t taken too much on herself after all. The few items I especially remembered from Jo’s little office—the framed square of her first afghan, the green rag rug, her framed poster depicting the wildflowers of Maine—had been put out here, along with almost everything else I remembered. It was as if Mrs. M. had sent a message—/can’t ease your pain or shorten your sadness, and I can’t prevent the wounds that oming back here may re-open, but I can put all the stuff that may hurt you in one place, so you won’t be stumbling over it unexpected or unprepared. I can do that much.

Out here were no bare walls; out here the walls jostled with my wife’s spirit and creativity. There were knitted things (some serious, many whimsical), batik squares, rag dolls popping out of what she called “my baby collages,” an abstract desert painting made from strips of yellow, black, and orange silk, her flower photographs, even, on top of her bookshelf, what appeared to be a construction-in-progress, a head of Sara Laughs herself. It was made out of toothpicks and lollipop sticks.

In one corner was her little loom and a wooden cabinet with a sign reading jo’s KNITTING STUFF! NO TRESPASSING! hung over the pull-knob.

In another was the banjo she had tried to learn and then given up on, saying it hurt her fingers too much. In a third was a kayak paddle and a pair of Rollerblades with scuffed toes and little purple pompoms on the tips of the laces.